When considering Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, does a company have to identify what the total system solution is before taking small initial steps? (Webinar Attendee Question)

No - you can start tackling the business side of the analytics problem without any tool being selected. Things like: agreeing on key metrics, identifying top business needs that analytics can help, identifying key source systems for data, etc. all can be done without regard to the tools that will eventually be used to implement the solution. However, before the technical work begins in earnest, the business does need to select the tool(s) that will be used to address this problem - there are too many assumptions about how/where data needs to be delivered and how it should be modeled that are tool-dependent for the work to *really* begin without the tool(s) being at least selected.